1. Home
2. Daily News
3. MacArthur ‘genius grants’ fellows include…

Careers

MacArthur ‘genius grants’ fellows include law prof, domestic violence researcher

By Debra Cassens Weiss

October 3, 2024, 2:30 pm CDT

Among the winners of the 2024 MacArthur Foundation fellowships, commonly known as “genius grants,” are a law professor who studies racial inequities and a researcher who studies the impact of technology on intimate partner abuse.

The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation announced 22 fellows Tuesday who will each receive no-strings-attached grants of $800,000 paid over five years, report the New York Times and the Associated Press.

The winners include:

  • Dorothy Roberts, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School. Her work has exposed racial inequities embedded within health and social service systems. One topic of her writing has been the prosecution of pregnant Black women for using drugs, she told the New York Times.

“I started this work in 1988,” Roberts told the New York Times. “To get this kind of recognition is very gratifying. Not only for me personally but for all the people, especially Black women, who’ve been devalued in these systems.”

  • Nicola Dell, a computer and information scientist. Dell studied the tactics used by domestic abusers to surveil their intimate partners. Dell co-founded the Clinic to End Tech Abuse. The group is staffed with volunteers who “check survivors’ devices for spyware, disentangle joint accounts, and provide other forms of privacy and safety guidance,” according to the MacArthur Foundation’s description.

  • Loka Ashwood, a professor at the University of Kentucky and a sociologist who has examined environmental injustice and anti-government sentiment in rural communities. She co-authored a book in 2023 that provides an overview of right to farm laws. Intended to protect family farms, the laws have been used by agricultural corporations to boost profits, Ashwood found.

  • Alice Wong, a writer, an editor and a disability activist. Wong founded the Disability Visibility Project “to amplify the unfiltered voices of disabled people and explore the intersections of race, ethnicity, gender identity and disability,” according to the MacArthur Foundation. She has also brought attention to policies that adversely affect people with disabilities, including bans on drinking straws and health care systems that don’t require masks.

Other grant winners include artists, writers, an oceanographer, an evolutionary biologist, historians, a cabaret performer, a filmmaker and an astronomer.